The Bank for International Settlements released working paper 1374 on a prototype that uses the XRP Ledger to timestamp cryptographic fingerprints of official economic datasets, enabling tamper-proof verification. The system delivered 3-to-5-second publication and 1-to-2-second verification times on XRPL's DevNet, with the full codebase open-sourced.
The Bank for International Settlements published a working paper Sept. 2 on an XRP Ledger prototype that timestamps official data fingerprints on-chain in 3-to-5 seconds.
The paper, numbered 1374, describes a system that hashes each published dataset into a Merkle root recorded on the ledger through a Payment transaction's memo field, the BIS research team wrote. The approach addresses a gap in the SDMX format used by international organizations to publish economic statistics, which has no built-in mechanism to verify whether a file was altered after release.
The prototype, built on XRPL's DevNet rather than the live mainnet, achieved median verification times of 1-to-2 seconds with very low on-chain costs. One ledger entry can cover thousands of datasets at once, and only fingerprints go on-chain — the underlying data stays private. BIS released the full codebase as open source, and the authors said the architecture could extend to other structured reporting formats including XBRL.
XRP traded at $1.37 as of Sept. 3, up 1.42 percent over 24 hours with $2.46 billion in volume, according to market data. The token's market cap stood near $85.7 billion based on a circulating supply of 63 billion tokens, though it was down 2.40 percent over the past week.
The BIS experiment adds to a growing list of institutional projects on the XRP Ledger. JPMorgan, Ripple, Mastercard, and Ondo Finance recently completed a tokenized Treasury settlement on the same network in about four seconds, while RLUSD stablecoin supply on XRPL has surpassed its Ethereum deployment. New ETF products and a live XRP listing through OSL Hong Kong have also emerged in recent months.
Community members on social platform X discussed the paper after its release, with some highlighting the technical details while others cautioned that the project remains a research prototype rather than a deployed system. The paper does not confirm any use of XRP tokens for settlement, and the experiment ran on a testing environment separate from live central bank operations.
Still, the choice of XRPL for a central banking data-integrity application marks a notable endorsement of the ledger's infrastructure for institutional use cases, distinct from the token's trading activity. The open-source release invites other institutions to review or build on the work, potentially broadening XRPL's footprint in regulatory and government data applications as blockchain-based data verification gains traction across central banking systems.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
